A client suggesting an alternative payment plan.
The Happytime Murders (2018) turns on a plot mechanism reminiscent of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988): humanity has a companion intelligent race, the puppets. These are provided by The Jim Henson Company, and are generally well done.
But, this may involve the same puppeteers as your beloved Sesame Street used when you were a kid, but this isn’t for your kids. This is about a hard-boiled private eye puppet, Phil Phillips, a disgraced former cop accused of deliberately missing a shot on another puppet who had a gun to the head of his partner. Not only did his shot miss the criminal puppet, the ricochet hit and killed an innocent passing puppet. Meanwhile, his human partner, Connie Edwards, fights for her life and suffers a life-threatening injury to her liver, but survives.
Years later, he’s as seedy as Sam Spade, scraping by, when an old friend, actor and puppet Mr. Bumblypants of Happytime Gang fame, a TV show now years defunct, is killed in an apparent porn store robbery where Phillips was in the back room, examining records for a client. Into this walks his former partner, Edwards, full of bitter zingers and reproach for Phillips, and the LAPD decrees they shall work together on this case.
As they investigate, though, In rapid succession other members of the cast of Happytime Gang are murdered: Phillip’s brother, Larry, is torn apart, Lyle is caught in a gang-land style hit, Goofer, a smack addict, is found drowned in the surf at the beach, and Phillips’ old flame, the human Jenny, dies in a car bombing.
Phillips is nearby for all but Larry’s murder, and so the police pick him up for questioning.
The plot continues on and isn’t a bad little plot overall, although there were times when it should have been creative and, instead, relied on dropping F-bombs like a World War II bombing raid. It takes advantage of some of the inevitable differences between puppets and humans, has a lovely twist at the end, but it’s not quite compelling. I think the problem lies with the puppet Phillips, because, despite the skill of the puppeteers, he is just not quite good enough at portraying his inner turmoil. It may be the fact that he’s a puppet, it might even be the cultural contamination of the various Muppet creative efforts. Or it could have been a pacing problem. I’m just not sure.
But I shan’t condemn it like Hollywood did, where The Happytime Murders was nominated for several Golden Raspberry awards; it simply wasn’t that bad. Dialog is delivered crisply, the human actors reach just the right balance of unease with puppets, the expected bigotry comes through, as does the fury of those humans who have reason to respect their puppet counterparts. And the two sex scenes (not the hot tub scene, which is only so-so) were absolutely delightful, as my Arts Editor’s guffaws confirmed.
But the script didn’t deliver as much creativity as was required, substituting inadequate profanity, and Phillips just wasn’t quite compelling. It’s an interesting effort, if only for trying to understand why it doesn’t quite make the grade.
